In comp.os.linux.advocacy, BearItAll
<spam@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote
on Fri, 31 Aug 2007 08:41:34 +0100
<1188546095.35397.0@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
> Linonut wrote:
>
>> After takin' a swig o' grog, Roy Schestowitz belched out this bit o'
>> wisdom:
>>
>>> Mono developer brings the Ribbon interface to Linux
>>>
>>> ,----[ Quote ]
>>> | In a recent blog entry, lead Mono developer Miguel de Icaza expressed
>>> | interest in using the new Ribbon interface components in a future
>>> | version of MonoDevelop, an open source IDE for C# programming.
>>> `----
>>>
>>>
> http://www.arstechnica.com/journals/linux.ars/2007/08/30/mono-developer-brings-the-ribbon-interface-to-linux
>>>
>>> A (Microsoft) Code Name a Day: Nautilus
>>>
>>> http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=687
>>>
>>> See the comment. This is looking bad. Yesterday:
>>> http://boycottnovell.com/2007/08/29/gnome-mono-plan/
>>
>> I hate to break it to you, but Miguel Icaza is and always has been a
>> gigantic charlatan. I have never understood why so many people put
>> him up on some godlike pedestal and proclaim his greatness so
>> much\u2013I have yet to see anything he has done that impresses me at
>> all. GNOME was a heavily rushed \u201cme too\u201d game that produced
>> a horribly unstable mess for many, many iterations of it\u2019s
>> release cycle. It improved greatly once Icaza followed his attention
>> defecit disorder to his next half-baked project (which also fell by
>> the wayside in favour, eventually, of MONO).
>>
>> But I have seen much to make me quite suspicious of his motives. And
>> his blatant love for Microsoft has been well-known for a long
>> time\u2026 Why is this still news to some people?
>>
>> In any case, I suspect XFce and fluxbox (for two) are nice fall-back
>> plans for those who find KDE to be too much.
>>
>> www.freedesktop.org
>>
>
> I saw that ribbon toolbar on a reps computer (he has Vista,
> the new office and before he left he had asked if I had had
> any success attaching Vista machines to the network because
> his IT couldn't manage it).
>
> Anyway, I noticed that he was having trouble each time he
> went up to the ribbon toolbar, even for things he must have
> used many times such as 'Open'. Then to run his presentation
> he was almost at the point of giving up, you know how flustered
> sales reps get when they patter doesn't go to plan, and you
> know how we don't help at all because we watch in silence
> with a smirk on our face, I was looking too and couldn't
> see anything that looked like Slide Show or Run or what ever
> MS calls it.
>
> That toolbar takes up far too much of the users work space
> and it isn't intuitive to use. It is another change for the
> sake of eye candy without any thought given to whether the
> change will improve work progress for users. But I also think
> it fails as far as eye candy is concerned too, it doesn't
> look good or clever or pretty, it just looks big.
>
>
> I hope we don't start going in that direction with Linux products.
>
I'll admit to some worry about such things; we have
*already* inherited some of Microsoft's "innovations"
in that area.
Some of them are true innovations, or at least reasonable
ones -- the Gnome panel, in particular, works reasonably
well and allows for the consolidation of iconified windows
in a reasonable fashion; presumably a large chunk of the
general idea (not the code) was borrowed from Microsoft
Office (where the notion originally came from, way back
when). Gnome also generalized and simplified the concept
somewhat; one can put the subwidgets anywhere on the
panels, with the possible exception of the pulldown menus
at the upper left. I do not believe the tray in Windows
is mobile, nor does Windows have two panels. Prior to the
panel the best one could hope for is a dedicated icon area,
and X to this day still has protocol for such icons --
IconWindowHint in the XWMHints structure in X11/Xutil.h.
It is not clear whether metacity still honors this hint;
a test program suggests that it doesn't. Twm, however,
does; so does mwm, although mwm might have a bug that
leaves the icon window mapped upon exiting.
Some of them are expressions that migrated the barrier.
Microsoft "innovated" the horizontally scrolling
file requester window. For some reason Java Swing's
file requester copied it. Thankfully, Java Swing did
*not* migrate a third innovation: the notion of hiding
file extensions. Gnome resisted both, and one hopes
they continue to do so; unfortunately, KDE also has
the horizontal scrollbar. (Nautilus and Konqueror are
excused, even though they have horizontal sliderbars;
they model the problem as a 2 dimensional scrolling
canvas, much like Finder in MacOS, Amiga's Workbench,
Windows Shell/Explorer, and quite a few other solutions.
It also turns out Nautilus does not use the horizontal
scrollbar unless the window isn't wide enough anyway.)
And then there's the upper right hand window close.
For anyone with sufficient perspective (translation: the
older farts like me :-) ) the change occurred in the Win95
timeframe as well, whereas heretofore close was always at
the upper *left*, and did not use the "X" (Motif used "-";
Amiga Intuition had a dot; MacOS pre-X had just a box).
Not sure who innovated detachable menus and buttonstrips
but they're in Gnome (and presumably in KDE), too.
Distribution of these is somewhat spotty; Nautilus does
not have a detachable, for example.
A large chunk of all this, of course, is that Microsoft's
visual items are what many are used to.
We'll see what happens with this "innovative" "ribbon".
--
#191, ewill3@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Linux. Because vaporware only goes so far.
--
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